© Fabian Seyfried, NetDoktor.de
Another comparison between community management and gardening? Except for the sketch, I am not going there. The health portal NetDoktor.de recently launched a new community, the Themen-Boards, while maintaining the old established one, the forums. As the new community manager I want to give you a quick overview why we decided to create a brand new community instead of just making changes to the existing one.
The new Themen-Boards are part of our effort to give users the option to connect with each other. In the first phase users can ask health questions, answer questions of others, share and comment links. These functions are actually the kind of things the members in our forums do most of the time anyway. Now in the Themen-Boards they are just much more streamlined and to the point. We tried to build tools that help the users do what they have always done – only more efficiently.
And do the users like it? Yes and no. Traffic in the boards is growing but there is very little conversion from the old forums to the new boards. The main reason being that the two systems are completely separate and not (yet) linked. Many forum users do not know about the Themen-Boards and many users of the Themen-Boards do not notice the forums. This separation has benefits and disadvantages.
The good:
- We can keep the new community in beta phase for a little longer and fix bugs before the flood of users rush in.
- We have the ability to observe what the users like and what they ignore.
- We do not annoy too many people when we add and remove features.
The bad:
- Users ignore the new shiny boards. Well, it is their choice!
- The new community is growing slower than it would have, had we forced the users to switch.
- We confuse users by giving them similar functionality in two communities.
- Two communities are more difficult to manage than one.
In the long run we plan to integrate the forums into the boards. Two will become one. We hope to lose fewer of the regular forum users if the boards work smoothly. The forums will still be there and will be the means for users to have open discussions, while the questions & answers and linked articles of the boards will offer a quick access to different health topics.
The biggest threat to a successful merge will probably be the user registration. The current forums do not have one. You can post anonymously without having to enter an email address or username. Will the registration process in the boards turn a lot of regulars away? We hope not, but what do you think?
Der Beitrag Growing a new community alongside an old one erschien zuerst auf Der NetDoktor-Blog.
